


Storytime

by UrsaErythraeus



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis, The Inheritance Cycle - Christopher Paolini
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-07
Updated: 2018-01-07
Packaged: 2019-03-01 21:45:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13303890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UrsaErythraeus/pseuds/UrsaErythraeus
Summary: Random prompts from friends.





	Storytime

The best part about owning a trans dimensional bar, Xander had found, was that eventually you got to know quite a bit about yourself that you never would have known otherwise. Sure, finding out he was allergic to saffron hadn’t been fun, and realizing that his long repressed bisexuality stood absolutely no chance of staying repressed when faced with a time traveling space hunk from the 51st century was traumatizingly terrific, but at least he finally knew why he was the “one with the ironic nickname about his sight that was really mean considering his pirate like circumstances”. It was only a title when spoken at the speed of Willow-babble, but it did get the point across. 

He, Alexander “Middle Name Retracted” Harris, the Slayer’s White Knight, King of the Cretins, was adopted. 

When he first heard that particular claim from the giant albino woman wearing all white fur, leaning against the bar chilling her vodka with a puff of breath, he was slightly confused. Even knowing that he was the only one working, he turned to see who she was talking to. 

Except, of course, no one was there. 

“Um,” he started eloquently. He stopped while he was ahead, and felt the urge to scratch at his ruined eye socket.

“You’re not from the same universe as that little red witch. It’s rather obvious you were dumped there as a babe.” The tall, scary lady dropped the information with a shrug that somehow looked more dignified than anything he’d seen from any president. She sipped again at her vodka. 

“Huh-wha-huh?” At least Xander was as brilliant a speaker as he had always been, otherwise that information would have left him seeming like a bumbling country bumpkin. Now he just sounded like a bumbling city bumpkin, a much better alternative. 

Xander guessed that if any of his friends had been told this, they would have immediately began denying it. Buffy would have already threatened Her Tallness, which given the disparity in their height would have been funny to see. Willow would babble protestations about Judaism and Mother Gaia and the latest computer language and her current favorite picture of kittens and then forgotten all about the claim until she ran out of breath. G-man would splutter and clean his glasses. 

Xander, though, couldn’t deny it. 

Something strange had happened to the luckless loser somewhere along the way, and now he could always tell when someone lied to him. The giant woman hadn’t lied. 

The woman pulled her blonde dreads to lay over her shoulder, resting just above her clavicle. She looked beautiful, and capable, and deadly, and (Xander could see now that he was looking) tired. 

“What do you want?” The words were out before he could even think of them, but he wouldn’t take them back if he could. Somehow he knew that she wouldn’t have offered the information if there weren’t something for her to gain from it. Also, he was curious. 

She smirked dangerously, like a certain blonde bastard he would never admit to being a friend, and that somehow sealed the deal. If whatever she wanted wouldn’t hurt him or his people, he’d probably give it to her. He wasn’t sure why, but he was sure, so that was enough. Maybe. Probably enough, just don’t tell Wills. 

“I could get a message out to your father. I can see his tie to you, still glowing with some strange magic, and I can send a message down that line for him to come to the bar, wherever it appears in his world. I cannot, however,” she paused for a moment, looking straight into Xander’s eyes, “I cannot guarantee that he will come. You would have to wait for him to come to you, with no guarantee that it would ever happen.”

Well, that was a whammy. A chance to meet his actual dad from another universe? On one hand, yay, not actually related to Tony! On the other, who could say his real dad was any better. After all, the witch lady (she could see magic and send messages down metaphysical connections, so therefore, aha, she’s a witch, no need to weigh her against a duck) had implied that his father was the one who left him in a different universe than himself. Sure, that had to have taken some doing, so his parallel papa was at least not apathetic to him, but what if they were prophesied to kill each other, like that Oedipus guy. He didn’t want to bang his mom!

Luckily the blonde witch stopped his thoughts on their metaphorical tracks. 

“All that I require is access to the back door.”

Xander had won his current position of barman to the multiverse in a card game. When the short man who called himself Adam, sometimes answered to Methos, and absolutely refused to acknowledge anyone who called him Death had handed him the keys, he had also given him one warning. 

“This back door here is special. If you’ve a mind for it, you can step out into any universe, at any time within that universe. Don’t let just anyone through that door, or deaths of millions will be on your hands.” With that cheery note, he had walked out the back door. 

So, Xander could possibly trust this stranger to not destroy a random universe on the off chance to maybe meet his father, who had abandoned him, and might not like him anyway. When put like that, it seemed silly that Xander was struggling with it at all. 

“Where would you go?” He was curious, and his eye socket still itched, and they were alone at the bar. Might as well hear her out. 

The woman looked somewhat surprised, as if she was expecting her request to be thrown back at her. She took a moment to figure out what to say. Somehow she even made her hesitance queenly. 

“I just,” her voice quavered, then she straightened her shoulders, “I want to go home.” She seemed almost surprised to have said it, as if she was expecting some suave manipulation to come out instead of, as Xander knew, the painful truth. 

“I want to go home, to long before my world’s death knell was rung by an impetuous human child. I want to see my people again, mighty and knowledgeable. I want to see that familiar architecture, and breathe that air. I want to speak my own language and have it spoken back to me.”

She breathed in slowly, refined elegance again taking over her features, before she simply repeated, “I want to go home.”

Xander could see how much it had cost her to be so open, and thanked the fact that they were still the only ones in the bar. Somehow he knew that she would never had admitted anything like that had there been more of an audience. Her pride, her vanity would not have allowed it. 

“Okie dokie,” he said flipping up the bar top and inviting her back. 

She waited a moment, as if expecting a cruel joke, before calmly gliding behind the bar. Standing side by side, she dwarfed Xander by at least a foot. 

“Hold our your hand, Defender of Man, so that I might send the message to your erstwhile father.” 

Xander realized that, as hasty as he was being this thing, whatever it was, was already happening.

“Uh, just to warn you, magic seems to go wonky around me.” With the warning in place, he stretched out his hand, palm up, towards the- wait, what was her name?

“What’s your name? If your doing that voodoo that you do so well on me, I’d like to be able to refer to you by name when I’m inevitably telling my friends where it all went wrong.”

She seemed amused by his babbling, which is of the good, as she calmly replied, “My name is Jadis.” So saying she reached out a finger and calmly traced a line along his palm, like the bogus fortune teller at the fair in fifth grade. It did quite a bit more than whatever magic the palm reader had done (he was still sore about not being the CEO of Hostess) as blue and gold sparks trailed behind her exploring digit. 

There was a warmth that beat alongside his heart for a moment, something great that he could almost remember, but when she lifted her finger it was gone. 

“The message is sent,” she said with that dangerous smirk back on her face. “Now, I will go home.” 

Xander was still too... too something to say anything to her as she approached the back door. He waved instead, and Jadis regally nodded in return before opening the door that would lead her home. 

“Farewell, Alexander. And thank you.” With that, she was gone, and the bar was quiet. 

_________

Xander heaved a sigh as he plonked a crate of clean glasses on the ground behind the bar, slowly beginning the process of putting them away. He wasn’t quite sure how the bar knew when he needed a break and didn’t have anyone wander in, but he was grateful for her. As much as he loved this job, it could be exhausting sometimes. 

Just as he thought that, he heard the front door creak open, and quiet footsteps enter the bar. Truthfully he hadn’t left the bar at all in three weeks, just sleeping on his bed in the small apartment overhead. He knew he was being silly, and also knew he was worrying his friends, but he couldn’t step outside just in case his father came. 

Cracking his back, he straightened up to look at his newest customer. 

The man was wearing a green tunic, brown pants in the same homespun material, and worn in leather boots. His hair was silver, with a well trimmed beard adorning his craggy face. His piercing blue eyes pinned Xander to the spot, seeming to stare straight into his soul. 

“So, we finally meet.” 

The words from the man would have been ominous coming from almost anyone else, but the old man just seemed happy. It was a quietly resigned happy, like he knew all he loved would be stripped from him regardless of what he did so he had to appreciate it while it was there, but it was a solidly warm happy nonetheless. 

Sometimes Xander hated his new insight. 

“Um, so, yeah. Who are you?”

The man’s eyes shuddered somewhat as he asked in turn, “Was it not you who called me?” 

It clicked then for Xander, the odd feeling of knowing the man without knowing him. “Dad?” he asked, knowing already he was right. 

He nodded, smiling slightly with warm eyes. 

“I am Brom Holcombsson, and you, young man, are my son.”

Xander’s not sure how he got around the bar, all he knew is that his arms were clenched tightly around the sturdy old man an instant after he claimed him as son. He was being hugged just as tightly in return, his father- his father!- breathing shallowly as if to combat the tears that had begun to flow from his eyes. 

“I thought you dead, I thought you dead and gone.”

The words cleared up somethings for Xander, but opened up a whole slew of questions. 

Before he could voice any, Brom held him out at arm’s length, just soaking in his face. They stayed in that strange plateau for a few minutes, just looking at each other. 

“You look like you’ve done well for yourself, my son,” Brom said as he gently cupped the side of his face with his thumb brushing the cheek bone beneath his ruined eye. “Not as well as I would have wished, but you are alive, and I can finally get to know you.”

“What happened? How did I end up in a different universe?”

Brom grimaced, but didn’t stop gently holding his son’s face. Xander might have pulled away from the gushies and the feels in almost any other situation, but he was still blown away by a relative actually wanting to know him. 

“Your mother was a powerful elven witch. She foresaw that you would die early if you stayed in our home world, and sent you away as soon as she gathered the strength to. I hadn’t even known that she was pregnant, and by the time I found out, it was too late. You were gone, sent I knew not where, and your mother had died from the exertion. All I knew was what she wrote in a letter to me, that you would one day contact me and then I would did you. I searched for years,” his voice cracked, and he finally looked away. 

Xander didn’t know what to say to that. His mother loved him enough to sacrifice herself for his safety? His father looked for a kid he knew nothing about for years? It sounded so absurd that, by Scooby law, it was probably true. 

“When your little brother was born, I stopped searching. I felt his destiny as soon as he drew breath, and I knew I needed to make sure he lived to face it. I’m sorry, that I stopped looking for you, but I am so glad that you somehow found me.” 

“Little brother?”  
“Little brother?”

The sound was strangely echoed, a feat which was easily attributed to both Xander and the newly arrived Dawn speaking over each other as they were wont to do. She had probably come by to check on him again, and overheard what Brom had said. 

“Is he cute?” was the first thing out of her mouth when Brom turned to face her. “I mean, is he single?” Her face turned a little red even as she tried to play off the verbal diarrhea with smirk she learned from Faith. 

Brom chuckled, his eyes glinting with humor, as he replied, “Yes, he is both cute and, seeing as he is five, single.”

That’s when it hit him. He had family that wanted him, a father and maybe a little brother and he wasn’t a Harris at all and the thought was so terrifying and amazing that absolutely none of Captain Jack’s pickup lines could even touch it, and, oh, did he say all that out loud?

Brom was outright laughing, a rusty sort of belly laugh that you could tell had not been used in a while. 

And that was how Xander Bromsson met his father.


End file.
